I'll be a little more blunt: I'm not sure what the difference is between shooting her dead i the street and smashing her over the head with a baton. Again, here's Moaveni, who I'm quoting because I think the things she writes about are interesting and helpful to a wide swath of readers on LBO. On the other hand, it rankled to read what you wrote because I really think it was sieved through Western eyes -- not that anyone can help that terribly much.
The women are not victims, and they've been taking clubs over the heads for years, and the men they dare to walk down a street with have been getting punching in the face and about the ears for the same "lifestyle issues" for years. Not only do they get punched in the head with a baton, but these women picked themselves up and charged the cops.
year: 2000
"Before the Islamic Revolution, people commemorated Ashoura tamely in their neighborhoods and went home by around nine p.m. But in recent years it had taken on grand, carnival-like proportions, with young people out in the traffic-jammed streets until two or three in the morning. Like everything else, it had been transformed into a battleground of wills between Iranians and the Islamic system."
Moaveni learns that this is "a most excellent night of the year to pick up guys. Young people from across the city congregated for what they called a "Hossein Party" in Mosheni Square in a busy neighborhood of northern Tehran.
...
The "conceit of "Hossein Party" is that each one of the young women "held a flickering candle in her palm, and had tucked underneath scraps of paper bearing her phone number; a great deal of preening went on, and lucky fellow "mourners" were slipped numbers as they passed.
The Basij stood aside and observed this decidedly unsorrowful behavior with surly faces. They are officially considered "volunteers" but they enjoy the regime's tacit approval for enforcing Islamic morals, usually with a great degree of violence. Many are impossibly young, no older than fifteen, but their eyes shone with the eager rage of unrestrained bullies. Some, with their untucked shirts and trademark beards, strode around aggressively, eyeing the crowd and dciing what totally harmless transgression would finally provoke their attack."
She asks one on a motorcycle why they are there. he replied, "They sit around with their candles pretending to mourn Hossein, when all they really want is to let out their sexual desires. It's our Islamic duty to control this."
...
The Basij circled a street corner where a crowd of teenagers stood talking ... and ordered them to leave. The crowd moved apart slowly, but some stood their ground. One, a young girl wearing clown-like makeup and a scant slip of a veil over masses of long auburn hairs, stuck a hand on her hip, and continued chatting into her cell phone.
A Basij raced up to her from behind, and cracked a baton over the back of her head. She doubled over, and hung like that for a full minute. Then, she drew herself up, and charged headfirst into the line of approaching policeman. Her parted arms forced them to break rank. Behind her a chaotic crowd of several hundred watched her. Some of them started to run into side streets, to escape the Basij, who by that point were swinging their batons around at will ....
after the crowd dispersed chased by Basij, she's left their alone and takes a taxi:
"as we inched through the clogged streets.. the driver talked morosely about Ashoura past, and Ashoura present. No one has their heart in it anymore, he said, recalling the cathartic, sincere emotionalism of Ashoura during his youth. His sons had also been at the vigil. I told them to stay homed, he said, but they said they had to go. Last year, they called it a a"Hossein Party," but this year they're saying "techno-Ashoura." What's techno? he asked shyly. He was worried about his sons, so I lent him my cell phone to call home and check on them. Clashes between socially deprived teenagers and vigilante thugs were always volatile, and black eyes and broken arms were not uncommon.
Often their worried parents accompanied their teenagers out on such evenings, and when a riot threatened to erupt, matronly moms with gray hairs peeking out from under their flowered headscarves beseeched the vigilantes -- with the cultural authority an Iranian woman of fifty-five should have over a boy of fifteen - to put their clubs and chains away. Their efforts met little success. The Basij were carefully selected in the poorest of neighborhoods and were cultivated to violence with a skillful balance of brainwashing and small incentives. I hated watching these scenes. I hated how I could scarcely recognize the traditions I grew up with in the Iran around me. I hated how the Islamic Republic not only dissolved the ties between exiles and Iran, but those between Iranians and their own culture."
(pp 57-9, Lipstick Jihad)